Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The $4 million round got you the teacher scaling process. In that advertising process, what did you learn? What were you advertising for?

Manan Khurma: We were looking for women. That was the initial set that worked for us. At that point, our teacher base was almost entirely women. Because we were home-based learning centers, we were looking for individuals who had some degree of stability. We were essentially looking for married women. If they had kids of their own, that was an added bonus.

Sramana Mitra: They can market through the schools then.

Manan Khurma: Yes, they can market through the schools. That happened quite a bit in the initial years when teachers would tap into their schools and advertise there as well.

Sramana Mitra: I can see that you can target on Facebook to married women in certain geographies. What about children? How do you find people with children?

Manan Khurma: We would run targeted ads for work-from-home opportunities. That’s how we generated leads. We also had a very stringent process. For every 100 people, we would end up selecting less than five. We put them through a training process. That would take a few weeks. Then they would start teaching.

Sramana Mitra: The learning tools were still these physical learning tools.

Manan Khurma: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: When you raised the Google round, how much were you making?

Manan Khurma: When we raised the Google round, we had a student base of 10,000. We were making $300,000 a month roughly.

Sramana Mitra: Was it just Delhi or other cities as well?

Manan Khurma: By then, we had expanded to other cities. Google Capital, which is the venture arm of Google, don’t generally do early-stage investments. In our case, they came in much earlier because they liked the impact that we were having. They were very impressed with the feedback they were hearing. In 2017, we closed the Google round.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Manan Khurma: We continued to expand going from tier 1 to tier 2 cities as well. One of the things we realized as we started to scale beyond that point was the hyperlocal matching of the business was limiting our ability to serve certain areas. If we didn’t have a teacher in a certain locality, we wouldn’t be able to serve students from there. If we had a great teacher coming from some area, but the pricing potential around her wasn’t great, then she wouldn’t be able to get students.

The physical nature of the business meant that there were certain limitations to scale. Towards the end of 2017, we started exploring the possibility of enabling our teachers to teach online as well. Back then, online was not so widely prevalent. From early 2018 onwards, we started building a live class platform that would enable our teachers to teach Math to kids sitting anywhere in the country.

This was not just about getting a teacher on a video call with a student. We wanted to replicate our offline experience in an online setting. That meant that we would have to create a custom learning platform engineered entirely from scratch where the kid was still learning by doing and taught in a very visual manner. That was a hard engineering challenge. We started this process in early 2018. It took us about two years to get it right.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Solo Entrepreneur Building a Venture Scale EdTech Company from India: Cuemath Founder Manan Khurma
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